On one of my mailing lists, there has been a small and thankfully not too heated discussion about the impending war with Iraq. One gent kept saying he doesn't care what they think, we should go into Iraq and kick Saddam's butt. To which another fellow replied:
Depends who "they" is. The "they's" think we're the they, so they feel justified in getting rid of us. We.
It was an attempt to point out to the original gentleman that there is more than one way to look at a problem, and that we may not have the complete story. The statement, though, jumped out at me another way, and I quoted for the list Rudyard Kipling's poem "We and They".
As an aside: It's interesting to look at Kipling's poetry. He was somewhat imperialistic at times, but he's more often misquoted and misunderstood. His sarcasm was mostly directed at his own people. And while he wasn't totally against war, he certainly wasn't for it. He lost his only son in WWI. And much of what he wrote was a warning against trading in freedom for security, as in The Old Issue.
In any case, the original gentleman didn't get it. He has no empathy for anyone who doesn't think the same way he does. Rather than look at the problem from the point of view of the entire world, he looks at it like an American would, just from the viewpoint of 9-11 and what the world has become to us. Such willful ignorance frightens me, but sadly it no longer surprises me. I don't think this gentleman can be cured, either. It took three ghosts for Dickens to give Scrooge some empathy, I doubt a mailing list can wake up this guy.
It worries me that people who are against the war are being called "anti-American" and "terrorist supporters" and other such propaganda. None of it is true, but it's being spouted so often to the beat of the war drums that it drowns out the honest responses. Worse, some of the anti-war folk are doing the same thing, grabbing the worst examples of pro-war people and painting everyone with the same brush. While I have told you of the gentleman on one of my mailing lists who supports the war blindly, he is hardly a good example of an educated pro-war citizen. He's just an ignoramus spouting off every chance he gets.
One of the readers of this blog wrote to me in e-mail, and we had a great discussion as to why I'm anti-war and why he's pro-war. At the end, we found we didn't have a piece of common ground. Either you believe Iraq is a serious threat and a source of terrorists, or you don't. Either you believe that a war will actually improve the lives of the Iraqi people, or you don't. Eventually we had to agree to disagree, because the conversation was going in circles.
That's it for the war for now, unless we invade tonight. Next blog: Aquaman! Unless the mimmoths eat my preview pictures...
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